David Horsey describes how you could get Romney as president, Biden as VP
As those of you who paid attention in social studies class will remember, if no candidate achieves 270 electoral votes, the decision is thrown to the newly elected House of Representatives. There, each state gets one vote. That is right, Vermont carries as much weight as Texas. Though California, Oregon and Washington together have 10 times as many voters as Alaska, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming and Idaho combined, those six sparsely populated red states would get twice as many votes for president as the three blue West Coast states.
Each state vote is decided by the state congressional delegations. In the current Congress, Republicans hold the majority in 33 delegations, Democrats hold 16 and one state, Minnesota, has a split delegation. Unless there is a dramatic movement toward Democrats in the 2012 congressional elections, Republicans will still control the most delegations in the next Congress.
That means an electoral college tie puts Romney in the White House. But the news is not necessarily as good for his running mate, Paul Ryan. The Senate gets to pick the vice president, and each senator gets one vote. If Democrats hold on to the Senate this fall, Joe Biden comes out the winner.
Throw in the distinct possibility that Obama, like Gore in 2000, could win the popular vote, and you’ve got a real nightmare of democracy: An incumbent president favored by a majority of the people gets tossed out by Congress and the new president gets saddled with a vice president from the opposition party.
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/topoftheticket/la-na-tt-uncharted-territory-20120814,0,3236469.story
